This memoir is about the most awe-inspiring thing I have ever seen. I have described it to dozens of people over the last 50 years—no pictures of it. My pocket-sized Minox camera used 8mm film. It would not have done this scene justice even if I could have found the presence of mind to get it.

I hope this memoir serves as a reminder about how nature can surprise us with incredible beauty and majesty, and sometimes take us to a place of peace.

The photo is by James Smeaton via Pexels.com. (https://www.pexels.com/photo/awe-beautiful-eyes-beautiful-girl-big-eyes-2709127/)

I woke with a start to the gentle roar of an aircraft carrier sailing across a flat, reflective, almost motionless ocean. The lack of heaving, surging, swaying, and rolling was jarring. 

For three days, the giant warship struggled through a storm as it crossed the Bering Sea from the coast of Russia toward the upper Aleutian Islands. The tempest stirred up a cold, wet hell of churning gray sea indistinguishable from the swirling gray sky.

But come this morning, we glided across a cloudless North Pacific as it lived up to its name.

After dressing, I reported to my shop’s office and made a pot of coffee. My friend John straggled in a minute later.

“Coffee,” he grunted.

“Brewing,” I replied, opening the porthole beside my desk.

He mumbled something, but I couldn’t respond. My brain was striving to reconcile what my eyes saw with any similar event from my past. There was none, not even in a dream.

The view was beyond imagination. From my vantage to the distant horizon, hundreds of thousands of Portuguese man o’ wars dotted the vivid indigo water. Illuminated by the morning sun, their translucent, crystal blue sails transformed the ocean into a vast, psychedelic star field.

As if in an opiate haze, part of me wanted to remain spellbound in front of the porthole. Camaraderie would not let me.

“Look at this,” I said, trying to speak loudly enough for the entire shop to hear. What came out was a reverent whisper.

Standing nearby, John could hear me and approached the porthole. I stepped aside and saw his ginger beard turn magenta in the morning light. 

His face became slack with childlike wonder.

I walked back into the shop, now filled with sleepy young men. Finding my voice, I implored them, “You have to see this!”

They groaned, of course. Sailors always grumble when blissful inertia is interrupted. Yet, intrigued by the suppressed excitement in my voice, they followed me out to the enormous hollow hangar deck.

We stopped and looked out the 25-foot high by 50-foot wide elevator opening to the sea. And there we remained, frozen in awe, until someone whispered: “Flight deck.”

Without discussion, we raced up the ladders and joined more of our shipmates on the broad, flat deck open to the sky, a crowd growing larger by the second.

Gazing upon 180 degrees of jeweled ocean, we thousand or more became one enthralled, as if we were all lost in the same thought.

How inconceivable it was in the yammering steel confines of this floating city that no one spoke, not a whisper, lest we break the fragile grace of that moment.